(Italian-born American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They were arrested, convicted and executed in 1920).

Jeeze, you take a simple vacation to see family and old friends, and by the time you get home, the Republic has been lost.

That will teach me to go have a good time. I should have known the alleged Grownups always scheme to have unpleasant or messy things wrapped up while the rest of us are munching hot-dogs from the grill and swilling beers.

Anyway, I got up this morning feeling not bad, a bit like a fuzzy image loading on the screen suddenly getting all its pixels in one place and becoming clear. There was a little red number on the iPad’s message screen when I rose, and it was from a pal out West- an unlikely time to be getting messages from the Central Time Zone.

“I am sick about Dallas,” said the words on the glowing screen. I had no idea what it meant. I went to Google and used the search terms “Dallas” and “horror” and swiftly came up with the event that may define this holiday just past, the one that celebrates liberty just as everything around it is going the other way.

Damn, I thought. I had done my due diligence as a citizen and checked the news before turning in. There was nothing about this, and I absently tuned in to watch an episode of “Elementary,” the Sherlock Holmes knock-off (Johnny Lee Miller as the famed gumshoe and Lucy Liu as Dr. Watson do a nice job) and drifted off to do closing-down things and put the day behind.

In the few minutes before I shut things down at the apartment, the reports must have been coming in. If I had known, I could have glued myself to the television for the hours it would have taken to digest everything that was getting clear overnight.

I sighed and got out of bed and resigned myself to the inevitable. I padded into the living room and turned on the television. There was not much more than was in the press reports, and I quickly tired of the harried correspondents standing in the pre-dawn Dallas streets, and the images from Poland of the President commenting from the podium at the NATO summit.

The sides formed up pretty quickly, and along the usual lines. It is a remarkably quick process, since everyone seems to have made up their minds already, and there is no real need for discussion. I was reading the comments section in the NY Times that went along with the article summarizing what had happened. There does not seem to be much common ground these days, and I don’t recall things being this black-and-white for much of my life as a voting citizen.

My pal Liz-with-and-S and I disagree on several of the key issues confronting society, but I respect her intelligence and her ability to do critical thinking, and we have navigated the depressing number of public outrages with civility and a desire to get to some common ground.

After the horror before the last horror, I even agreed with her that people on the Terror Watch List might be flagged as “unsuitable” for purchasing firearms- but with the stipulation that faceless apparatchiks not be able to place people on the List without due process and means of appeal. I don’t think following the provisions of the Constitution should be unilaterally abrogated just because someone feels the need to do something really fast. You know what always goes along with that.

But that is getting old. Someone wants a Revolution out there, and they tried to start it last night. This is like something out of the Sacco and Vanzetti saga, something savage and alien and yet strangely familiar. You remember the story, I’m sure, but if not, here it is in brief.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born American anarchists, who were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the armed robbery of a shoe company in South Braintree, MA, in 1920. They were executed shortly thereafter, and became posthumous poster boys for an anarchist movement that advocated relentless warfare against what they perceived as a violent and oppressive government.

You can fit that narrative together with current events any way you like. I am opposed to murder on general principles, though, and particularly ones committed against my family (or myself).

All of our cohort in age have the t-shirts on the ‘coming revolution’ by virtue of coming of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, when my hometown put itself to the torch, and every morning the paper was screaming that someone else prominent had been gunned down.

We got through that. I assume that we can do it again, but with the rule of law now open to question, and different standards of justice applying to important and lesser people, I get the sinking feeing that our collective life-line to a shared understanding of the role of those who rule and those that are ruled is being lost.

That makes me very sad. I am getting too old for this shit.

In fact, I think we all are.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com